Some printing systems use a heated drum or roller system to form an image on a target media, such as paper. For example, to from an image by laser printing, heated rollers can be used to create a hot nip in a laser printer fuser. In an offset solid ink printing process, a heated drum may be used to support an entire image prior to an image transfer onto a target media. Such heated roller systems can maintain a temperature of the ink on their surface in a viscoelastic state which allows the ink to better spread and penetrate into the target media during transfer. Such a process can improve the ultimate print quality by, for example, increasing solid fill density, decreasing ink layer thickness, and increasing the durability of the prints.
Related art drum heating for solid ink-jet printers has been accomplished by using external quartz halogen lamps that are mounted in reflector assemblies. More recently, an internal mica/wire based drum heater has been use for drum heating, as describe in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,713,728, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. However, such offset solid ink systems face a number of thermal challenges. For example, the challenges can include increasing an operational lifetime of the heating element, maintaining a uniform imaging drum temperature and achieving a fast warm-up rate. Further, an image drum cooling system may be required to cool the drum when, for example, printing images with high ink coverage. Accordingly, the ability to maintain a consistent drum temperature is required to control the properties of the ink for optimum printing quality.